KEY POINTS:
LOS ANGELES - Tim Daly of Clarendon, Virginia, found a message on his voice mail threatening him with arrest if he showed up to vote.
"This is the Virginia Elections Commission," the message said. "We've determined you are registered in New York to vote. Therefore, you will not be allowed to cast your vote ... If you do show up, you will be charged criminally."
Daly, who has lived and voted in Virginia since 1998, quickly figured out this was not the Virginia Elections Commission at all, but a rogue operation intended to intimidate Democratic Party sympathisers like himself.
Within hours of the polls opening in Virginia - battleground of one of the tightest Senate races in the mid-term elections - both the state attorney's office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had opened inquiries. But reports of dirty campaigning, most if not quite all of it carried out on behalf of the Republican Party, cascaded across the country so fast that it was almost impossible for law enforcement, or anyone else, to keep up.
In several states, Democrats - especially African Americans - complained that they had been called and told the location of their precinct had changed, when it hadn't. In 20 of the closest House districts around the country, registered Democrats and independents found themselves bombarded with so-called "robo-calls" - computer-generated messages that sound at first like get-out-the-vote initiatives on behalf of Democratic candidates but grow ever more negative as they go on until it finally becomes clear they are endorsed by the Republican Party.
Voters complained not only that the messages were deceptive, but that they arrived with deadening regularity, sometimes very late at night, in what appeared to be a concerted effort by Republicans to anger their recipients and turn them off the idea of voting at all.
In Virginia, Peter Baumann, from Cape Charles, reported getting a call from a purported Democratic volunteer telling him his polling location had changed. When he told the caller he was a poll worker and knew perfectly well where he was voting, she hung up. Buckingham County, which is heavily African American, was flooded with fliers that read: "Skip This Election" in large bold-face letters.
About 10,000 lawyers working for the Republican and Democratic parties were dispatched across the country to intervene if problems arose. The US Justice Department also sent more than 850 observers to 22 states.
Election officials also reported electronic voting machine malfunctions in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, but said many of problems were minor and temporary.
- INDEPENDENT, agencies
